Archive for April, 2009

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Love, hate: the Venus-Mars conjunction

April 23, 2009

When I started this blog, I imagined that I would probably update it several times a week, at least reflecting on major transit activity and when there was none, abstractly musing on a particular element or sign or whatever, or just posting a weird Cindy Sherman-like self-portrait. Well, in a week like this, that is a highly unreasonable goal to meet, because it’s been a very astrologically intense week, only some of which I can succinctly summarize.

On Tuesday, Venus and Mars were conjunct at 29 degrees of Pisces, which was kind of a big deal. According to all the reading and research I did on this conjunction, it was to be a moment of huge release where relationships were concerned, a simultaneous closeness and letting go. I was tongue in cheek about it on Twitter, saying it would probably involve a lot of sex, a lot of crying, or both. Then again, Tuesday was also my father’s birthday, so I didn’t exactly want to think about those two events in the same instant. For most of the day, I thought about how exhausted I was, because I had been unable to sleep the entire previous night; I had been laying awake, thinking about The Philosopher. I can’t stop thinking about everything that’s wonderful and amazing about him, and how much of him I’ve missed since we haven’t communicated. I’m coming to terms with the fact that once we finally get to talk, the outcome will most likely not be the one I want, and I’m doing my best to just accept that for what it is. However, that doesn’t change how I feel about him as a person, as who he is. He broke up with me in a mean way, but he’s not a mean person by nature. He may not have been ready for me emotionally, but he’s not a cold person by nature. It would be easier to just get over him if he was arrogant or stupid or truly insensitive or pathologically insane somehow, all of which he’s not. Nobody who knows about the break-up seems to believe me, but he is actually one of the single most amazing men I have ever met in my entire life- and anyone who knows me well knows that I don’t throw that description around lightly when talking about men as a rule. All during the Venus-Mars conjunction I had nothing but loving, adoring thoughts towards him. On the one hand, considering how strongly I still feel, it was kind of nice. On the other hand, an aspect like this really inflames my T-square of Mars opposing Chiron both square Venus- what I like to refer to as my “Miss Julie” complex, after the August Strindberg play. Intellectually and abstractly, I do not like or trust men- that is to say, male/patriarchal culture at large and how it has conditioned me to care so enormously about what men think of me- but in spite of myself, I am still attracted to them, and I feel like being with someone like The Philosopher would add this incredible and needed sense of balance and sweetness to both of our lives. This may totally be my Jupiter and Neptune in the 7th House talking, but his being so unlike so many of the other men I’ve been involved with in the past made me want so badly to be the best possible woman (in my own personal archetypal sense of the word, not in a Cosmo sense of the word) I could, and show him in turn how unlike other women I am, and how there was something super-primal and just unbelievably gorgeous to be found in each of us for the other. Which of course made the sting of the break-up that much worse, that there was something so beyond either of us I wanted to give him that he just rejected. I think I may have even said to him at one point, “I thought you were different. You’re just like everyone else.” I really wanted to believe he was different, anyway.

*single tear*

Of course, now that Mars went into Aries on Wednesday, I can’t be dwelling on these feelings because aside from there just not being time, they’re not efficient for that type of energy. Venus conjunct Mars in the last degree of Pisces and then Mars entering Aries the very next day is really fucking awkward. It’s like wanting to be cuddled right before you have to go to work. I had to get ready to leave for another out-of-state shoot, so there were a lot of other things that I needed to get done that could not be expedited by laying on my bed all heartbroken like Miss Havisham from Great Expectations on crack. From here on out for the next several weeks, I have to make a conscious effort to move forward, not only for the sake of getting my work done, but also for the sake of abating my Miss Julie complex. (I could write about Miss Julie for days. Maybe one day I will, but not this day.) I’m glad that I did at some point in my life finally get to be involved with a man who actually inspired so many sustainable positive feelings. At the same time, though, I can’t use him as a reason to hate or immediately distrust every other man I ever come across. (I mean, I was doing that anyway, before I even met him.)

Besides, Mars in Aries is all about new things. It’s starting over and figuring out an entirely new way to deal with these kinds of emotions. Maybe I have to re-evaluate way, way, way far in advance what I will and will not tolerate from a man so that ultimately I don’t end up feeling violated when he disappoints me and he doesn’t end up smashing his head open when he falls off my pedestal. Hopefully by the time I return home from this shoot, some new developments will have arisen, either with The Philosopher or maybe even with a new set of characters entirely, so I’ll have an opportunity to implement a new strategy. I hope, anyway. Mars in Aries is a horrible, horrible backdrop to have left things hanging open.

I have been awake since five this morning, so my mouth is also hanging open. I am going to go to sleep so that I will have energy for the Taurus New Moon tomorrow, and whatever it wants to whack me upside the head with. Probably something beautiful but really heavy and painful, like a Ming vase.

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Of Taurus Born: why I turned out to be a complete slob

April 20, 2009

Yesterday marked the Sun’s ingress into Taurus, which for some people is like the greatest thing EVAR and for others is like the worst thing EVAR. On the upside, Taurus is the most sensual, body-oriented sign, so it can involve a lot of digging around in the garden, gorging yourself with chocolate, and big sloppy fuckfests. On the downside, Taurus is also one of the thriftiest and most conservative signs, so it can also involve a lot of paying for things with exact change and eating the same pot of turkey chili for two weeks so you can afford to open an IRA. It’s funny how in Taurus, you have to be willing to do a lot of the second thing so that you can afford to do the first thing later on. Some of us, however, are just not that patient, which means instant fail in Taurus world.

Truth be told, Taurus energy has always been very hard for me to wrap my head around, both astrologically and in life. In my mind, I would certainly like to live in a more Taurus-friendly way- that is to say, clean house, three healthy square meals a day, growing my own vegetables, knitting my own blankets, with a good-sized savings account, but certain other mitigating factors in my life prevent this, in ways that totally elude me. When I think about it, it’s probably actually more denial than misunderstanding, since both my parents are Tauruses. “Whoa, hold on a minute!” you might be exclaiming, “both your parents are Tauruses?!” My entire life, people who don’t even know astrology have yelled that at me, like it’s THAT BAD. For a Pisces-Gemini-Gemini, it’s certainly not EASY, I’ll say that much. It’s hard for two Tauruses to understand that you can’t tell your Pisces-Gemini-Gemini child to just “stop being so sensitive,” like she’s doing it on purpose. But for the most part, it’s certainly not THE WORST sign you could want for a parent.

I look at my parents as exemplifying the two stereotypical extremes of Taurus, based on both my natal Sun-Moon square and the uneducated moron’s view of Taurus. My mom is what the uneducated moron might refer to as the “good Taurus.” She has always been the mom who wants all of my friends to come sleep over, like ALL OF THEM AT THE SAME TIME so she can cook for everyone and show us her new Max Ernst book or play us her new CD of Syrian wedding music. Without realizing it, I think my mom’s secret dream is to operate a bed and breakfast, or a home for wayward children; I think the most people we’ve ever had living in the house I grew up in at one time were my parents, myself, my sister, my sister’s boyfriend, another friend of ours in town to do an internship, and a German exchange student. And if anyone else had wanted to crash for a while, my mom would certainly not have said no. In addition to being the hostess with the mostess, my mom is also an expert shopper who rarely ever buys anything from a designer label at full price, and she has never been stingy with anything that could make herself or me and my sister more beautiful. She’s the mom who instructed me that if I see something basic I really like, I should get one in every color, and we can spend hours poring over vintage jewelry and stuff that a lot of girls have to fight their mothers to enjoy. She even offered to pay for a nose job if I wanted one. (I actually don’t, but thanks, Mom.) In short, a “cool Taurus.”

My dad, on the other hand, is what the uneducated astrologer might refer to as a “bad Taurus.” This is not to say that my dad is not a nice person, or doesn’t enjoy having twenty million other peoples’ kids in his house at one time, or even that he isn’t generous- he (and my mom) have always made donations to NOW and Southern Poverty Law Center and whatever presidential candidate they happen to be supporting at the time. He just doesn’t share my mom’s pleasure-and-quality Taurus outlook, because his is overshadowed by a thrift-and-economy Taurus outlook, especially around food. I cannot even count the number of times that he has rationed out my food into pitiful workhouse portions, telling me, “See if you can finish that before I give you any more,” even when I was a husky thirteen and fourteen years old and clearly capable of eating four times that amount, and he always seems to flinch a little when my mom starts plating up doggie bags to give everyone after we’ve had dinner company. And it could also just be a male thing, but unlike me and my mom, he has not come to terms with the fact that looking presentable requires shelling out a little bit of cash. He’ll be the first person to point out when a woman is unattractive and be disgusted, but then he’ll harangue me about, “Why would you need to spend $250 getting your hair highlighted? Isn’t the stuff in the box good enough? Why did those shoes cost $125 on sale? I only pay $10 to get a haircut, why can’t you do that?” His version of quality spending and comfort involves the word long-term- which is smart, don’t get me wrong, but not always totally practical for everyone, especially not in my situation.

My situation being that I am 1) a girl, whose physical appearance is a major part of one of her four jobs, 2) not really being paid enough just yet to invest for anything long-term, and 3) away from home too often and for too little pay to live a life that has any routine or security. When I do come home I’m still so tired and/or busy that to say I live like a cross between the kids in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Big and Little Edie in Grey Gardens is absolutely no exaggeration. Once my Taurus best friend (who also has Pluto as a final dispositor, but in a different house than I do) spent the night, and she remarked how she admired that I was able to go about my life at home without letting the staggering mess upset me, that she would obsess over it and not be able to function until it was spotless. As if to say that I’m totally okay with the mess. My parents have not seen my bedroom in my apartment since I moved in there, mostly because I’m concerned about them having early heart failure, especially my mom. I think what my parents and best friend don’t always realize, in their Taurean cocoon, is that it’s not that I’m resisting living like a human and not a feral child/reclusive blueblood. My natal chart AND my life just don’t afford me that kind of internal order. It’s a big effort for me to 1) carve out the time to get myself organized and 2) actually have the wherewithal to maintain that kind of routine. Short of FlyLady coming and standing over me with a whip while I throw everything into garbage bags, the transition from chaos to order is not going to happen just instantaneously for me.

That’s why I’m hoping I can actually gear myself up to utilize the Taurus period. I’m going to be away for work for quite a bit of it, but changes made during a Sun in Taurus transit stick, and if I can at least get everything where it’s supposed to be (like in real life, not in my mind), I’ll have made a start in the right direction, which will be somewhat of a good birthday present for my parents. And ultimately, less of a polarization between the two sides of Taurus. Not good, not bad, just secure, and enjoying it. And when I am done, I am going to eat so much chocolate OMFG.

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Venus goes direct, Lucy goes kaboom

April 16, 2009

So Venus is supposed to go direct tomorrow, which simplistically means that all the problems and issues and hang-ups we’ve all been having about relationships over the past while are going to melt away and be fixed. And then I woke up. It’s been maybe three, four days since I wrote about drunk-dialing my most recent ex-boyfriend (who I’ll refer to from here on out as The Philosopher) and been all, “Yeah, when he wants to contact me, he will, no worries, I’m a feminist.” But of course, as always, when you tell yourself not to think about something, that’s all you think about. I don’t know whether he reads my blog or not, but I thought, “Aha! Maybe he will, and he’ll write! He’ll call! He’ll come down here and surprise me!” But did he? Of course not.

Now reasonably I know this was probably expecting too much. The Philosopher did, to be fair, tell me that he is very busy with academic conferences right now, and I know he’s not lying because I actually do know his entire conference schedule, since I am cuckoo for Coco Puffs I was a conscientious girlfriend. But my impatience got the better of me, because 1) I too am incredibly busy with work (hello, I was not even in town for close to a month, and I’m getting ready to leave again next week) and I still managed to make the time for him even while we weren’t together, and 2) The Philosopher did not exactly break up with me in the most saintly and respectful manner, and I feel I am owed at the very least an enormous apology. To hear the language and tone of voice he used while ending it, you’d think I was that girlfriend who’d been making my wedding dress already and picking names for our six kids. I may be a lot of things, but I am not and have never been that girlfriend. (When you have natal Venus in Aquarius, you CAN’T be that girlfriend if you tried.)

In truth, I can see how I freaked him out. I have truly thought about it and I feel terrible about it. But ultimately, all I did was be forthcoming about how much I really MFing like him, which I’m sure terrified him. I don’t play hard to get. I don’t pretend to be unavailable when I’m wide open for business. If someone I liked felt about me the way I feel about The Philosopher, I would be elated beyond elated. But then again, I’m a very Plutonian Pisces. Intimacy doesn’t scare me, and neither do male neuroses. The Philosopher is a Scorpio, but he also has Sagittarius rising and a Libra stellium. Every astrologer I’ve told about this situation and his chart has unanimously agreed that I walked right into this one, because he simply cannot handle me, and that there are probably a lot of men out there who not only could handle me, but would be honored and privileged to, and that’s who I should be focusing on. Well, yeah, but I like him. Waaaaahhhhhhhh.

Retrograde and direct turns and their effects are never really hard and fast; sometimes major revelations can come to you before a planet turns direct again, and even after a planet turns direct it takes a few days for the energies to settle back down that way. So I guess despite my puzzlement, it made some sense that when I went out to meet friends from work for drinks Tuesday night, I was flooded with Venusian goodness in the form of male attention. My sometimes brusque but well-meaning friend James saw me and said, “You look really good! Have you lost a lot of weight or something?” No. But thank you? My always crass but lovable friend Dane arrived shortly thereafter and said, “You look really cute! You’ve got this beautiful glow. Are you getting laid or something?” Absolutely not. But thank you? And my friend JM had actually brought a very attractive non-work friend with him, who I spent a long time talking to and actually ended up exchanging phone numbers with. That doesn’t happen! Not to me, anyway.

So WTF? I thought to myself. I mean, I did look really good that night, even for me. But still, I can’t typically get male attention on my own. I feel like Al Pacino in Cruising when I try to be attractive to men in public, let alone when someone as positively awesome as The Philosopher actually likes me back. And then it occurred to me: this was exact déjà vu of Pluto retrograde, when I wrote about owning my own power. Why am I waiting for someone else to validate me? Why am I resting so much on The Philosopher’s response to me? The ball is totally in his court now; I did my part ages ago by being straightforward from the beginning. So much else has gone on since then. My feelings for him are exactly that- my feelings, from my-self. And yet I’m still acting like my feelings are some tentacle-y extension of him controlling me. WTF INDEED!

Don’t get me wrong. I want to hear from him. I want to see him and talk to him and find out if he’s reflected at all on needlessly making me feel like the worst person in the entire world. I want proper closure right now like some women want a baby. But I certainly don’t have to stop my life down until I get it. The Philosopher’s actual feelings for me, whatever they may be, are not THE ENTIRE WORLD’S feelings for me. And more importantly, they’re not mine, and shouldn’t dictate mine.

The thing that’s really upset me in the wake of the break-up is that I keep wondering if he’s “the one that got away.” But a friend suggested that maybe it’s the other way around, that maybe I am. Maybe I am, and that’s what the whole Venus retrograde period was trying to get me to come to. Heavy, especially when I don’t really believe that at all. But we’ll see what happens. Not to the exclusion of anything else simultaneously going on in my life, though. Enough already.

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Psycho love, drunk dials, and slasher movies: when Mars and Uranus attack

April 12, 2009

It has been a long time since I last posted, which I realize isn’t going to fly most of the time. The last week has been truly Piscean in all ways possible: I returned home to New York from Los Angeles on Wednesday morning (after having been in four more cities prior), I have spent nearly all of that time asleep or drunk, and I have barely gotten out of my gray slip, to the point of building other outfits around it for when I HAD to go out. I didn’t realize how sleep-deprived I had actually been until I woke up and realized I’d missed the Full Moon, i.e. all of Thursday and most of Friday. (Which, in Libra, may have been a close call, but maybe not, for reasons you’ll find out below.)

Friday night was a wrap party for another show I worked on earlier this year, and I wasn’t even going to go until someone reminded me that it was karaoke and open bar. I am glad I went, because I had a really good time during the part I remember. Usually I’m a complete lightweight who stops at one and a half drinks (known affectionately as “Nurse Lucy” to my friends), but I know for a fact that I drank WAY more than that. I remember eating a lot of mediocre sushi, I remember singing “Sweet Child O’Mine” and being told I had a great voice (by someone who was also undoubtedly very drunk), and I vaguely remember singing something else but having someone whisper back-up vocals to me while holding me up. Then somehow I was in a cab, and I came home. And that’s all I consciously remember.

Of course, since I’m only an occasional total alcoholic, in the morning or afternoon or whenever it was that I woke up, I had to make sure that I hadn’t done anything stupid. All my belongings were intact. All my clothing was intact. The only telltale signs of anything being slightly off were that my knees were all bruised, for some reason Netflix reported that I had watched an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents called “The Older Sister,” and my phone reported that around one in the morning I had called the man who recently dumped me. Wha-at?!

Now mind you, with the exception of one e-mail exchange a month after the break-up, with the promise of further communication after he’s less busy, we’ve had no other contact. And it says the call was only thirty-three seconds long. So I figure that possibly 1) he didn’t answer, 2) he hung up, or 3) I called him with my ass by accident, as I am sometimes prone to do when my phone is in a pocket or garter belt. An honest mistake. I think? I’m not sure. Mars and Uranus are both conjunct my natal Mercury right now- had I paid attention to that, I probably wouldn’t have even brought a phone out. (Then again, had I known how drunk I would get, I probably would have eaten an actual dinner first too.) But the fact of the matter is that the call is complete and total news to me- which means that I am NOT some kind of Glenn Close freak- and he hasn’t acknowledged it or me in any way- which means that at best he didn’t even notice. Or at worst, won’t ever talk to me again. Which would be bad, because I am still kind of a little obsessed with him, in the most innocuous non-bunny-boiling way possible.

When you’re me, and your disposition is more Victorian than anything, prone to blushing excessively when embarrassed and crying at the slightest provocation, and you have a natal T-square of Mars, Venus and Chiron, and Pluto is your final dispositor, not to mention transiting Neptune and Chiron on your natal Venus, it does not bode well for your coping skills in the wake of failed relationships. My most recent counter-intuitive strategy has been to watch a lot of slasher movies. Like more than I usually watch. As crazy as it sounds (but this is what Pluto does to you), I can almost sort of understand why the killers need to kill and possess their victims in the way they do. Ultimately all they want is unconditional love and acceptance, which they were deprived of in childhood, so they try to create it with trophies and relics from their murders. It’s actually really sad, when you think about it.

But what I remind myself just as I start to worry that I am truly psychotic and capable of murder is that the killers in films don’t truly know what it means to love- they see their victims as disposable objects. They don’t have any regard for their victims’ feelings or needs, which is why they can just as easily “love” a piece of their victim’s liver or their severed head as they can the whole live person- sometimes more, even. Eventually, we all have to come to terms with the fact that someone we love just may not love us back, and move on. And yeah, it’s painful as shit, but if we can’t do it, we are crazy. If we truly loved them to begin with, we would not be dictating their emotions, assuming that they always felt the same way about us.

So in sum, if he wants to contact me again, he will. I have every reason to believe that he will, but if he doesn’t, I can’t make him. The least I can do is stop imagining how the conversation will go, and stop beating myself up over how I’m imagining he feels, because I don’t know, and I can’t know until he tells me. In the meantime, I have only my feelings for him, which I must make sense of regardless, and which I must point out do not include anything you would find in a B-grade slasher movie.

In the meantime, I think I’m done drinking for a good long while. I more than got it out of my system, I think.

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Pluto retrograde the homewrecker

April 4, 2009

I’ve spent the past three entries talking about work, which I know is only titillating or interesting if you’re another workaholic like me. The work isn’t done; I’m currently in Los Angeles until Tuesday night, helping with the edit. I am still not totally sure of what time zone I am in and I am exhausted- but at least I am in the same place for more than three days. No, I am not going to write about work this time. I have bigger, more looming problems right now.

You see, today Pluto turns retrograde. Pluto by itself is the planet of transformation and the subconscious, and it shatters everything it touches in general. But when it turns retrograde, the knife twists even deeper. It hurts like a bitch at first, but ultimately makes you a stronger, better person. Right? (Right?)

So what’s wrong with that? Well, if you’re me, transiting Pluto falls in your 7th House of relationships, and is smack on your natal Neptune. YEAH IT IS. Pluto’s been transiting my 7th House since I was in high school; it goes without saying that my adult relationships since then have been fraught with conflict, to put it mildly. This Pluto placement (natally or by transit) does two things: 1) it makes relationships transform you profoundly and 2) it makes you give your partners a lot of power over you, a lot more than they usually deserve. Being a Pisces with natal Neptune and Jupiter in the 7th House, you can well imagine that my sensitive little heart doesn’t take well to being trampled on by transiting Pluto over and over again- especially when I really believe that I learned something valuable from the last time. And the retrograde turn of Pluto isn’t going to make it any easier. If anything, it’ll hurt way worse, because it’ll be that much more internalized.

Last winter after a particularly strange break-up with a particularly strange man, I wrote an e-mail to Shirley Soffer, my beloved teacher, entitled “Lucy Has Too Much Pluto,” in which I lamented my transiting Pluto in the 7th House, and how it’s put a hideous dark twist on all my relationships so that they are never happy or romantic, and how Pluto won’t officially be out of my 7th House until 2013, when I’m 29, so it’s possible I would just never find anyone that was right for me because the Rapture was supposed to happen in 2012 and we’d have all been annihilated. In her reply, Shirley told me that I am not a puppet being pulled by Pluto’s symbolic strings, and that I need to own Pluto’s power for myself and learn to create my own strength and happiness instead of just letting my partners control me. This is certainly most true while Pluto goes retrograde; with the energy turned inward, grasping my own power can come a lot more easily.

Which believe me- I do need, especially if I like someone. Especially lately, having recently been dumped like yesterday’s trash by someone I am still absolutely crazy about. Venus retrograde, currently in effect for the next two weeks, already had me spending a lot of time agonizing over what I could have done differently and, in Aries in my 11th House, prompted me to (after a lot of solitary crying and zombie-movie-watching) direct more of my other-directed energy towards friends, since I am so extremely not ready to even be thinking about being with anyone else that’s not him. But that all looks like cake and ice cream as compared to transiting Pluto retrograde conjunct natal Neptune in the 7th, which is like the universe yelling, “YOU STUPID IDIOT WHAT WERE YOU THINKING.” (Of course, it’s kind of hoarse from yelling that for about a year now, but I digress.)

In a way I’m lucky that I’m still so busy, because it’ll allow me to step away from the Pluto a little bit. (Which is so subconscious anyway that dwelling on it only gives you an ulcer.) But as soon as I’m not so busy, I know I’m going to have to spend some time thinking of how to change my approach. Because if I don’t, I’ll end up in the same boat as always, feeling like I’ve just realized some horrible mythic truth about the inherent evil of mankind as soon as somebody wrongs me or leaves me. In an attempt not to buy into the Pluto transit, I’m going to look ahead towards the good in it, like the fact that I am pretty intense and that as much as I would love to have a serious and loving relationship, I totally don’t need another person to shatter my optimism. I can do that myself, for serious.

I do, however, need someone to tell me what time it is, because it totally feels like 4 in the morning right now even though I know it’s really not.

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